[I attended] "Harrogate Grammar School and Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham Boys’ School as it was then called and I am proud to note that I am included in the list of alumni on each of these schools’ Wikipedia sites."
I was more than a little stunned that these two fine educational establishments should be so bereft of significant alumni as to resort to including an obscure chess arbiter on their Wikipedia page. Visiting the Harrogate GS page, I duly discovered Mr Edwards's name, sitting at the bottom of their list of nine Old Harrogatian nonentities. The penultimate entry reads:
Tony Lecomber - senior British National Party member and convicted criminal.
Such refreshing honesty - I cannot help feeling that, if I were running for office, I might have been rather less keen than Mr Edwards to draw the electorate's attention to this unfortunate piece of information!
The Haberdashers Wiki page actually does include several well-known names amongst their alumni (Barnes Wallis, Fiona Bruce, Scott Parker, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Steve Harley, etc), which makes Mr Edwards' appearance there look even more out of place.
Naturally, given the open editing system used by Wikipedia, I got to wondering who might have been responsible for posting the information about Mr Edwards on the relevant Wiki pages. Interestingly, the Harrogate GS entry was made on 11 August, and the Haberdashers one later the same day, both using the same computer/ internet connection, as identified by the IP address number. The person concerned (or at least, his/her IP address) has never made any other Wikipedia entry, other than three posts - one on each of the two school sites, and one edit three days later, to add the all-important "J" between "Roger" and "Edwards".
Looking up the IP address, I see that it belongs to someone with a Sky internet connection, who lives somewhere in Stoke-on-Trent - coincidentally, the same city where Roger J Edwards lives!
"You are so much more adorable than None of the Above!" (photo: en.wikipedia.org)
